Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics

In June 1868, Salmon P. Chase noted pessimistically that he did
not expect to be nominated for president at the coming Democratic convention. Said Chase, "The talk about me will come to
nothing. The Democracy is not democratic enough yet."1 The chief
justice was correct in his assessment and for the fourth time in sixteen years a major party bypassed him as its standard-bearer. Chase
knew after three previous disappointments that his position on
rights for blacks--in 1868 it was his advocacy of black suffrage--
was too advanced for his nomination. Throughout his public career
he had been in the vanguard of the movement for racial justice, first
taking up the cause of the fugitive slave as a young Cincinnati attorney in the late 1830s. Through the 1840s and early 1850s he labored
in the Liberty and Free-Soil movements until emerging into greater
national prominence as a founder of the Republican party. Three
unsuccessful tries for that party's nomination revealed him to be too
pronounced an advocate of racial equality to be acceptable. Thus
when the Democrats rejected him in 1868, Chase was prepared for
the outcome.

There were other flaws in Chase's ongoing search for the presidency. Most especially he was regarded by many as an overly ambitious politician willing to stop at nothing to advance his own goals.
Beginning with his controversial election to the Senate in 1849, and
continuing with his use of the governorship of Ohio as a stepping-
stone to the presidency, Chase alienated countless politicians in his

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